Lenora Fulani
New Alliance Party
Black-led independent socialist running a two-tier critique that both major parties were rigged against working-class communities of color. The first of several New York City runs.
A century-and-change of New York City mayoral platforms from candidates who lost the race — and the surprising number of their proposals that eventually clawed their way back to life.
In New York, ideas don't die — they just change carriers.
An interactive catalog of policy proposals from losing New York City mayoral candidates between 1886 and 2025: what got buried, what came back, and what's still waiting.
Each dot is one losing-candidate proposal, placed at the year it was first floated. Color marks fate. Hover to see the proposal.
Every proposal in the dataset, with category, fate, threads, and source attribution. Filters from the controls bar apply to this table. Click any column header to sort.
| Year | Candidate | Proposal | Chapter | Fate | Threads | Coverage | Source |
|---|
Source attributes each entry to the most direct provenance available — the candidate's published platform where it survives, the relevant biography or memoir, contemporaneous press coverage, or Wikipedia entries that themselves cite primary materials. Where only secondary press coverage exists for a contemporary entry (2009-2025 candidates), that is noted.
Categorization follows the report's four-chapter taxonomy: won (the idea became law in some form), ahead (still in serious circulation, not yet enacted), bad (the prescription was wrong, not just the politics), strange (in a category of its own).
Fate is the more granular cut: adopted means meaningfully implemented in some form; alive means in active policy debate or partial implementation; buried means decisively rejected with no current movement.
What this is not. This is not a complete record. Several losing campaigns — Dinkins 1993, Ferrer 2001 and 2005, Thompson 2013 — produced platforms that haven't been mined here. Reader corrections welcome.
Ideologically improbable echoes — same idea, different decade, different team jersey.
Hillquit, Thomas, Buckley, Mailer-Breslin, Abzug, Green: people with serious, articulated worldviews who lost to candidates whose appeal was machine-based, charismatic, fiscal-emergency-oriented, or self-funded. Voters don't pick mayors based on idea density. The ideas keep coming back anyway.
Bike lanes were weird in 1965. Decriminalization was weird in 1965. Public housing was weird in 1917. Civil rights ordinances were weird in 1977. The category of "obviously crazy mayoral idea" should be regarded with some humility.
Sweet Sunday was operationally impossible. Mandatory civil commitment for addicts is morally indefensible. Banning private cars from Manhattan in 1969 with no replacement infrastructure was a thought experiment, not a plan. The category of "actually unworkable" is also real.
Hearst was right about utility capture and mostly wrong about whether municipal ownership would have improved things. Buckley was right about narcotics policy and wrong about what to do with addicts. The diagnosis tends to be more durable than the prescription, and voters should be more skeptical of the second than the first.
No-chance contenders who left a documentable trace anyway. Not in the main dataset because each finished with under two percent — but each ran on one specific big idea worth remembering.
New Alliance Party
Black-led independent socialist running a two-tier critique that both major parties were rigged against working-class communities of color. The first of several New York City runs.
Conservative Party
Bond-trader and Buckley acolyte running a doctrinaire libertarian-conservative platform: abolish rent regulation, shrink City Hall, privatize what could be privatized.
The Rent Is Too Damn High Party
A one-man party built around a single sentence and a pair of black gloves. The platform was the party name. He repeated it with greater intensity each cycle.
Green
Brother of Kalief Browder, who took his life in 2015 after three years on Rikers awaiting trial. Browder's flagship plank was closing Rikers immediately, paired with a broader criminal-justice and homelessness platform.
Independent
Celebrity ex-NYPD detective whose 2017 platform fused aggressive pro-police rhetoric, opposition to bike lanes, and an unusually hands-on focus on street homelessness. Ran on the Dump de Blasio line.
Democratic primary
Longtime director of the Police Reform Organizing Project who challenged de Blasio in the 2017 Democratic primary on a single-issue platform of ending Broken Windows policing.
Democratic primary
Brooklyn rapper and performance artist whose platform was $2,000-a-month universal basic income, rainbow costumes, and free-food giveaways. Took it as seriously as anyone in the field.
Empowerment Party
Self-described data-driven Smart City candidate, running an accounting-style budget analysis well ahead of the field — every line item, every contract.
"Failed" here means lost a general election or a major-party primary, between 1886 and 2025. Henry George ran in 1886 — pre-consolidation — but he is the godfather of the genre and is included. Ideas first proposed by losing candidates that were later adopted by winning candidates appear under the original loser-proposer; eventual victors are mentioned only as carriers of someone else's prior idea.
Four chapters: eventually won (the idea became law in some form), ahead of their time (still in serious circulation, not yet enacted), probably bad (the implementation was wrong, not just the politics), and truly strange (in a category of their own). The "fate" filter — adopted, alive, buried — is a more granular version of the same axis.
Drawn from the Gotham Center for New York City History, City Journal, Manhattan Institute, Jacobin, the Forward, the New-York Historical Society, the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, Skynomics Blog, and contemporaneous press. Specific candidate platforms were cross-checked against multiple accounts where available.
This is not a complete record. David Dinkins's 1993 reelection bid, Mark Green's 1997 and 1998 races for higher office, the full 2017 primary field beyond Sal Albanese, and Whitney Tilson's deeper education-policy planks all sit just outside what's catalogued here. Reader suggestions welcome.